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Updating our Amazon AMIs to EBS-Backed and Switching to RDS

20120116 · Post A Comment

We started run­ning our site(s) on Amazon’s cloud for flex­i­bil­ity. Unfor­tu­nately, we started when the ser­vice was very young, and that meant it was dif­fi­cult to back up our instances. We kluged a backup script in Python from some­one else’s script posted on their blog. I just had a search and I can’t even find the source any more — this was at least two years ago.

So now, it’s my job to bring us up to the present. We had a prob­lem where our server was crash­ing dur­ing the backup process — first, the backup would eat up any free space on our root device, which would then slow the site to a crawl as it got stuck at 99% cpu usage. Then, I would reboot the instance only to find MySQL was unable to start because the device was full.

Luck­ily Ama­zon offers a Rela­tional Data­base Ser­vice which basi­cally pro­vides more robust/updated data­base servers in the cloud. I switched us to this ser­vice for our main two data­bases (a blog and a forum) and so far it’s run­ning smoothly.

Now, I’m attempt­ing to get rid of the last bit of ves­ti­gial, non-cloud-friendly tech­nol­ogy that we’re using — filesys­tem back­ups and auto­matic AMI bundling. This requires cre­at­ing a new EBS vol­ume, for­mat­ting the vol­ume, copy­ing the entire filesys­tem to this new vol­ume, snap­shot­ting it in the AWS con­sole, and then cre­at­ing an image from the snap­shot (also in the AWS console).

I got a lot of help from this blog post: http://thewebfellas.com/blog/2010/4/19/create-an-ebs-boot-volume-from-a-running-instance

as well as this gist on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/1004950

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the past lit­tle bit here. That, and all the debugging/troubleshooting/error-deciphering/guru med­i­ta­tion that goes along with it.

The good news is that once I’m done, our servers will boot faster, be eas­ier to back up, and hope­fully, more resilient.

 

photo credit: lrarg­erich via pho­topin cc

OKCupid App Adds Geo-Location. Is This Awesome?

20110714 · Post A Comment

Recently, there was much ado about an Apple patent that was filed, where it would allow users to locate peo­ple near them, and browse a small pro­file. In a per­sonal dis­cus­sion, some friends and I agreed that it wasn’t that likely that Apple would ever actu­ally make some­thing like this, but here they were patent­ing it just the same. I thought to myself, “this seems like some­thing OKCu­pid would do.” Lo and behold, that’s exactly what they’ve done!

OKCu­pid first came onto my radar because of their excel­lent blog, OKTrends, where they occa­sion­ally per­form sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of the peo­ple using their site. Every­thing from what you should send in your first mes­sage through what types of pho­tos tend to get the best rat­ings is cov­ered. They recently wrote an arti­cle called, “What if there weren’t so many white people?”

A friend tried to show me her pro­file, but since it was pri­vate to OKC users only, I ended up mak­ing one myself. The site is so well designed that it gen­tly pushes you along to fill out your pro­file and answer match ques­tions, all the while reward­ing you by mov­ing a bar from left to right labeled “Pro­file Com­ple­tion”. Need­less to say, my pro­file is now com­plete. Damn you, gam­i­fi­ca­tion! Read more…

WebOS Is The New BlackBerry

20110713 · Post A Comment

HP made a large pur­chase last year — they bought Palm. And with that came Palm’s brand spank­ing new smart­phone oper­at­ing sys­tem, WebOS. Despite a rocky start thanks to under-powered hard­ware and battery-sucking early builds, WebOS has actu­ally got­ten decent reviews. Every­one who uses it seems to say that it’s a really solid oper­at­ing sys­tem. And they say it with a glim­mer of sad­ness, since it seems like noth­ing could unseat Apple as the king of Smart­phone Moun­tain, nor Android as the rogue gath­er­ing an army and prepar­ing to lay siege against the incum­bent king.

And yet, HP might just have a fight­ing chance. Recently, they released the Touch­Pad, a tablet which in many ways rivals the iPad or the cur­rent favorite Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Crit­ics will say that the Touch­Pad is crip­pled by lack of soft­ware, but they’re miss­ing the point. Every­one has dif­fer­ent needs from a smart­phone, but remem­ber when the iPhone didn’t have apps at all? It sur­vived in part because, as 37 sig­nals put it, “Ten Apps Is All I Need”. Do those basic apps well, and most peo­ple don’t need much more. Pretty much every app that you want to use is made to work with Mobile Safari, and should work fine with WebOS’ browser, which also runs on WebKit.

Did I men­tion it already has a cus­tomized Face­book app/web lay­out, some­thing which even the iPad doesn’t have? Or that it has its own Skype client? Because it already has both of those. And that’s why HP is going to take the scepter of “busi­ness tablet” away from RIM and their Play­Book. HP has deep pock­ets to pro­mote this thing, and they’ve already started adver­tis­ing on TV. It’s cur­rently priced the same as the iPad, and while it may not be fly­ing off the shelves, we can expect HP will drop the price around the hol­i­day sea­son and adver­tise around then too. Read more…

More Domain Hacks and Cool International Domains

20110413 · Post A Comment

Bored with your .com? Are you over your .org?

In a world where “cap­tur­ing the .com” is gen­er­ally thought of as nec­es­sary for brand suc­cess, a few proud rebels stand apart from the rest. We are the domain hack­ers, and we make the inter­net more fun for everyone.

Remem­ber Del.icio.us? That is one early exam­ple of domain hack­ing. I’ve talked about it here before, too.

Today, we’ll just look at the .so domain exten­sion, from Soma­lia. Here are a few that I found were avail­able, along with ideas for what they could pos­si­bly be used for:

  • virtuo.so (a musician’s per­sonal site)
  • espres.so (cof­fee or fast news)
  • youare.so, (you are so… what?)
  • iam.so (/hot /cool /witty, etc.)
  • thats.so (/trendy /typical)

Here are a cou­ple of other, non-Somalian, domains that are avail­able at the time of this writ­ing (.gy is from Guyana):

  • fog.gy (San Fran­cisco? London?)
  • futu.ro (obvi­ously it’s about the future. Also futurolo.gy)
  • pr.odi.gy
  • slan.gy (urbindic­tionary competitor?)
  • tan.gy

I think that’s enough for today. If you want to pur­chase any of these domains, head on over to 101Domain (my pre­ferred inter­na­tional domain reg­is­trar, I used them to reg­is­ter this site) and get it taken care of.

Thanks for reading!

PS — I found sev­eral cool web­sites while research­ing this post. Here are the three coolest:

  1. wasa.bi
  2. syzy.gy
  3. zom.bi

2010: Year In Review

20110228 · Post A Comment

Hi there! Wel­come to a new decade. We’re glad you decided to join us, here in the future.

Any­one who knows me could prob­a­bly tell you how much I like “the future” (answer: quite a lot), but I’ve been pretty hes­i­tant about pre­dict­ing my own future. I may have devel­oped the ten­dency to not plan too far in the future from two places:

  1. Tim Fer­riss. In “The 4-Hour Work Week”, Fer­riss sug­gests that it’s dif­fi­cult if nigh impos­si­ble to keep plans for 6+ months. Mostly, I agree with this, but I intend to chal­lenge it.
  2. My Job. Work­ing for The Art of Charm is excit­ing, nerve-racking, chal­leng­ing, and ful­fill­ing, all at once. Most of all, it has taught me how work­ing for a (rel­a­tively) small busi­ness is a very dynamic process, and not too much is set in stone.

What­ever the rea­son, I’m going to break the habit of not-planning some­what and set down some pre­dic­tions as to what might tran­spire in my life this year. But first, Seth Godin told me to write about what we “Shipped” in 2010.

Not a bad year at all, if you ask me!

That’s all for now. I want to pub­lish this post so I can start writ­ing the next one.

###

PS: I tried to fix the com­ments. I’m sorry they were broken. Ow! Don’t hit me! That’s abuse! They should be work­ing now. Please leave your thoughts below.

Cool Domain Names: Fan.gs And More

20110212 · Post A Comment

So, as you well know by now, I’m a pro­po­nent of non-standard domain names. I reg­is­tered my domain with 101Domain and it was super-easy. I just today was brows­ing around to see what new domains are com­ing out (.xxx! Really!) and I found the .gs domain from South Geor­gia… it pro­vides excel­lent pos­si­bil­ity! See for yourself:

(I’ve checked, and these domains are avail­able as of 3:30pm PST 2/11/2011)

  • ban.gs
  • fan.gs
  • bootle.gs
  • plasticba.gs
  • 3kin.gs
  • angelwin.gs
  • flyingpi.gs
  • thon.gs & g-strin.gs

Cool, right? That was a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion. I can’t even hear you when you respond to those ques­tions, silly goose!

Full dis­clo­sure, I’m an affil­i­ate for 101Domain, so if you buy any domain names from them, I get a small amount.

BTW — I had orig­i­nally bought this domain with the hope of rank­ing for my name, which turns out to be really dif­fi­cult. How­ever, today, I just found out that if you Google for “alex weber is awe­some”, this site is the first hit! Sweet!

Being Unfriendly

20110122 · Post A Comment

Who Will You Unfriend Today?

Dis­claimer: I take no respon­si­bil­ity for the actions that you take after read­ing this post. In fact, even land­ing on this page with­out read­ing this dis­claimer absolves Alex Weber of any and all respon­si­bil­ity for your actions, past and future. Fur­ther­more, this page is mainly a #rant and not meant to be seen as advice.

Here are my qual­i­fi­ca­tions for when to…

  1. Remove some­one from my Face­book news feed
  2. Un-friend them on Face­book completely
  3. Hang out less in per­son with someone

The first part is easy.

If you write pre­dom­i­nantly neg­a­tive updates on Face­book or Twit­ter, I don’t want to see it.

Every­one has ups and downs, and I under­stand that. How­ever, the fact that we had two classes together in High School does not mean that I want to hear that your “boo” is cheat­ing on you, or that you got fired, or that the weather is bad.

Here’s my point: If you pre­dom­i­nantly post neg­a­tiv­ity, I will fil­ter it so it doesn’t infect my brain.

It’s been shown that Hap­pi­ness is Con­ta­gious and I’m pretty sure neg­a­tiv­ity works that way too.

You may think “Alex, you’re a ig ol’ stick in the mud! We just wanna vent sometimes!”

I under­stand vent­ing as a short-term thing. I’m talk­ing about repeated neg­a­tiv­ity, weighted with how well I know some­one (how much we actu­ally inter­act, mes­sage, talk, see each other IRL etc.)

My cri­te­ria for IRL friends:

This is not a hard list, but more of a set of cri­te­ria that I feel is impor­tant with my IRL friend­ships. Read more…

Transcending the Human, DIY Style

20101231 · Post A Comment

Anonym, a biohacker, has spent the last several years doing “DIY transhumanism,” learning how to extend her own senses.

“The existing transhumanist movement is lame. It’s nano everything. It’s just ideas,” she says.

She inserted small metal discs of neodymium metal, coated in gold and silicon, which give off mild electric current when in a electromagnetic field. When inserted under the fingertips, this current stimulates the fingers’ nerve endings, allowing the bearer to literally feel the shape and strength of electromagnetic fields around power cords or electronic devices.

Her next project: a small compass chip with a power coil that can be charged externally, and output in the form of neural-grade electrodes, all to be implanted near her left knee.

She’s put herself in the hospital several times.

This Post Isn’t About The Holidays

20101128 · Post A Comment

I know it’s Win­ter Hol­i­day Sea­son, but shut up. I’ll get to that later. Maybe.

I did a really sat­is­fy­ing small project today. First, some back­story and musi­cal accompaniment…

Felix YZ — Binary Min­imix by Felix_YZ

Alex Weber, The DJ

Years ago, I was a Super­fa­mous World-class DJ who was loved and feared far and wide.

(I thought I told you to shut up, just go with me on this one, OK?)

So, while I was busy being awe­some, I met Jor­dan from The Art of Charm and he was so impressed with my unique com­bi­na­tion of exes­sive charisma, social grace, and total nerdi­ness that he basi­cally pleaded with me for like a year to join his com­pany and help them be more awe­some. Some­thing like that.

Being as legendar-ily amaz­ing and infi­nitely com­pas­sion­ate as I was am, I could not refuse. So I set aside my diamond-encrusted platinum-plated SL-1200s and joined The Art of Charm in their quest to teach men every­where the Way of Excellence.

Mine was way cooler. It had diamonds.

Over time, my immense fame and rep­u­ta­tion has dwin­dled. How­ever, I was pre­sented with an unique oppor­tu­nity recently: Join forces with DJ Van­de­lay and Xiaoyu to form… Some­thing Awe­some That Has No Offi­cial Name!

This is pretty much awe­some, and I’m really excited at the chance to DJ live again.

Some­thing Like A Tragedy Strikes! Read more…

Party Team Extreme

20101103 · Post A Comment

This post isn’t for the faint of heart–or liver.

Alex Weber wants YOU! for Party Team Extreme

Do you have what it takes… to be a mem­ber of PARTY TEAM EXTREME?

I’ve been kick­ing this idea around for a while to make a list of the biggest/best/awesomest par­ties and fes­ti­vals from all around the world, and sys­tem­at­i­cally attend­ing them. You’ll find the cur­rent list at the bot­tom of this post, and I encour­age you to sug­gest others!

So what about the PARTY TEAM? Well, if you’re the jet-setting, adventure-seeking, pretty-bitchin-awesome type of per­son, I invite you to come along for this rad jour­ney. You don’t have to come for all of the events, but I’d love to assem­ble a crew who can descend on any fes­ti­val whether it’s Mardi Gras, Car­ni­val, or La Tomatina and GO HARD. Like I said before: DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES?

If you’re read­ing this, you just might…

If you want to learn more, the list of events is below. I’m arrang­ing them in a rough order of how I’m think­ing of attend­ing them, start­ing with US/Canada events and mov­ing far­ther abroad. Any­thing past the first two or three is not in any sort of order other than how soon I found them. Read more…

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